DOJ: Philly Gun Buyback Program Misused over $450,000

Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- The Department of Justice (DOJ) says a Philadelphia gun buyback program misused more than $450,000 provided for the program. The buyback program was administered by the Police Safety Net (PSN).

According to NBC Philadelphia, the DOJ’s inspector general found that “62 percent” of the total grant money allotted to the PSN was used for “unallowable, unsupported, and/or unreasonable” expenses.

For example, PSN’s executive director Raymond Jones used some of the money to give “himself an $85,065 pay increase” over a period of two years. This brought his annual pay to $287,565.

Moreover, PSN spent “$29,750 in rent on a building that was used once a month” and did not properly account for utility bills totaling $13,947.

PSN was supposed to use the money to buy gift cards to be given to citizens who brought guns into the buyback program. However, the DOJ also discovered there were 280 gift cards which had not been traded for a firearm yet could not be accounted for.

About:
AWR Hawkins writes for all the BIG sites, for Pajamas Media, for RedCounty.com, for Townhall.com and now AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

His southern drawl is frequently heard discussing his take on current events on radio shows like America’s Morning News, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the Ken Pittman Show, and the NRA’s Cam & Company, among others. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (summer 2010), and he holds a PhD in military history from Texas Tech University.

If you have questions or comments, email him at awr@awrhawkins.com. You can find him on facebook at www.facebook.com/awr.hawkins.

How about the state’s DOJ demanding that Mr. Jones repay that $85,000 pay increase? Or that PSN repay the money used to rent the building? Hopefully someone in the DOJ was smart enough to cancel those 280 missing gift cards … or determine if they were ever used.